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Glaciers in the Himalayas have not drastically shrunk despite climate change and are unlikely to melt away in coming decades, a Chinese scientist says.

Professor Zhang Wenjing, glacier expert at the Chinese Academy of Sciences, discounted previous forecasts that glaciers across western China could disappear in decades or the Himalayan glaciers could melt away in 50 years, reports the Xinhua news agency.

"Those predictions may be excessively pessimistic," he says. "So far glaciers in the middle and eastern part of the Himalayas have not shrunk on any large scale."

Zhang does not question climate change, but says it would take perhaps centuries to melt the dense ice packs that accumulate and creep down the Himalayas.

"The glaciers in the region are melting comparatively slowly," says Zhang, who is taking part in an international expedition to study the mountains.

Zhang's comments appear to clash with the conclusions of many other scientists and conservationists that many parts of the Asian mountain chain are likely to experience severe melting as global temperatures rise in coming decades.

In the past 40 years, glaciers across the Tibetan plateau that spills from China into South Asia have shrunk by 6600 square kilometres, especially since the 1980s, the conservation group WWF says in a 2005 report.

The glaciers now cover about 105,000 square kilometres, it says.

A report on climate change organised by Chinese government agencies says last year that considerable uncertainty surrounds the effects of rising average temperatures on glaciers in different regions.

But the report forecast that "by 2050 glaciers in China's west will have dramatically shrunk".